Small Town
by bellelovesbooks
Summary: You can become famous for the stupidest things in a small town. My stupid claim to fame was Gilbert Beilschmidt. Human Teenage AU


**A/N: Be warned, this is my first fanfiction. I never read angsty fanfics if I can help it, so I'm not sure how well the angst here turned out. Also it's partially based on real events and it is a human teenage AU so it's probably kinda…weird. And possibly OOC. Rated T cause I'm new to all this.**

**I _wish_ I owned Hetalia….**

There's something about living in a small town…even if you don't mind the size, sooner or later, something makes you want to leave. Maybe you get over it. Maybe you leave and come back.

Maybe not.

But if you stay in a small town long enough, there comes a point when everywhere holds some memory…and the odds are, after half your life, some of those memories are painful.

Take me, for instance. Elizabeth Herdervary. I don't care that I can count the number of places to hang out with friends on one hand, that there is no night life, that you have to drive at least half an hour to get to the nearest shopping mall. I do care, however, that every day when I go to work, I pass the place I had my first date. That the shopping center is where I was French kissed for the first time. That I walked home from that pizza place in the pouring rain with my second boyfriend. I care that everyone in my church frowns a little at me over the rumors that follow me after three years because there is only so much to gossip about in a town this size.

Even though they are things that tie me ever more tightly to my hometown, these are the things that make me want to leave.

These, and the fact that the person who figures most prominently in my memories is already gone.

I don't want to make this a long, drawn-out, angst-ridden piece of writing, though God knows I could do it. This is supposed to be the truth about the love triangle that shaped me, that was nothing special in the scheme of things but because of where I live, made me the talk of the town. I don't think I could write anything but the bare bones of it – I tried once, and I wound up sobbing over old journals and giving the idea up for awhile.

So bear with me, please.

When we moved to this town I was ten years old, and I was a ragged little tomboy who didn't fit in. I more or less grew out of the tomboy description, but never out of not fitting in. Consequently, while I had plenty of crushes, no one ever seemed to like me back. I was homeschooled, so I was part of a tight community even before I started going to church. I was also hopelessly naïve, even up until I was eighteen. I guess this is the story of how I lost my innocence, though not in the way the gossips talk about. I lost my naiveté. I learned what teenage boys are like, what middle-aged women are like, and what first love is like.

So, picture me at fifteen. I was small and pale, with medium-length brown hair and hazel eyes. I refused to wear makeup and I had a few friends who fit in about as well as I did. I was quiet, unless a boy teased me into losing my temper and beating him up with my lunchbox until he hid in the boys' bathroom, and if people talked about me then I didn't know it. The spring before I turned sixteen, the oddest of my friends invited me on a trip with her family and a couple of other homeschool families.

She regretted that invitation for years.

You see, on that trip I met the boy who has shaped the rest of my life. He was my first love, and as I write this, he remains my only love. He was thirteen years old, annoying as hell, and caused an immediate rift between me and Natalia when he and I became immediate friends. When we began seeing more of each other in our homeschool group that fall, our names started to be spoken together, and for years afterwards, that's how it remained. Gilbert Beilschmidt and Elizabeth Herdervary. Best friends.

We only got closer over the next year. We laughed, he teased, I cried/yelled/cursed and always came back. He loved to push me until I broke and I loved how sweet he was when he didn't. If we were both in one place, you didn't see one of us without the other, and naturally that led to gossip. I was absolutely falling in love with him, and absolutely terrified that I was being obvious about it. We flirted with each other, both terribly inexperienced, and I for one was always left equal parts frustrated and confused. I don't know when he worked out that I liked him, but he did, and he loved using it to make me squirm.

Of course he loved driving me crazy. He was fifteen and in love for the first time.

About here is where it gets complicated, because of course it had to get complicated. Gil and I didn't only hang out alone – we also spent a fair amount of time with his cousin Bella and a boy named Roderich. Roderich was a year older than Gil, tall, thin, with dark hair and amazing blue eyes hidden behind a pair of glasses. While I didn't realize it for some time, he was competing for my affections in a quiet, awkward, and utterly gentlemanly way.

Gil won, but…

Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. In short, this is how it actually went down. When I was seventeen and about to graduate from high school, I had decided that Gil and I were only ever going to be friends and that I had best get over him. You know the feeling, I'm sure. Meanwhile Gil had decided that I needed to get over that idea and that Roderich needed to get over me, and that the best way for this to happen would be for me and Roderich to date.

Gil was not the sharpest crayon in the box when it came to relationships.

I didn't find out until later that that was what was in his head; at the time all I knew was that I wanted to stop loving Gil and that Roderich had worked up the nerve to ask me out. I hadn't quite believed that Roderich actually liked me, so I was plenty flattered. And he was wonderful, in his own way. He tried so hard to be a gentleman to me, was there to talk, was so _different_ from Gil…

We went on one date. It was wonderfully awkward, as first dates always are, and that particular idea of Gil's went absolutely nowhere. We didn't go on another date that spring, or that summer. What _did _happen that summer was that Gil apparently decided I had gotten over the idea of getting over him (I'm actually still not sure what his thought process was at this point, and I suspect the answer would make me hit my head on a wall at his idiocy, so I've let it go.)

I ought to mention here that while I was (and am, I guess) a Christian I had never gone to church regularly, while Gil was part of a _very_ conservative church in which women wore skirts and never cut their hair and jewelry was frowned upon to such a degree that most members didn't even wear wedding rings. There was no way in heaven or hell I was ever going to fit myself into that church, but I didn't know it then, and I would have followed Gil to the ends of the earth (still probably would, but with a little more caution and a little less blind devotion.) So that summer I bought some secondhand jean skirts, stopped cutting my hair, and went with him and his cousin to a youth camp.

While we were staying with another cousin before that camp started (everyone in his church is related in some way. It's that kind of deal), Gil decided to put into motion a plan he probably called something like "Make Elizabeth admit to my face that she likes me even if she faints from too much blushing along the way and forget to mention that I feel the same way because I'm an idiot." Granted he probably didn't plan that last part, but looking back I shouldn't be surprised that he did it.

At the end of youth camp things were actually pretty much the same. Gil continued to baffle me and think he knew everything, and we continued to be friends. I turned eighteen, never having been kissed. I imagine people were talking. Roderich and I were still friends as well.

Eventually it occurred to Gil that I was still being hopelessly dense about our situation and he clarified that he did in fact return my feelings. However, even if he hadn't been only sixteen, his (ridiculously strict) parents wouldn't have let him date me. I went to church with them, but I was slowly but surely leading their son very much astray. We didn't know it, but they did.

I may or may not have rolled my eyes in exasperation as I wrote that.

Gil and I ended up in a worst-kept-secret relationship, which his family has yet to forgive me for. It went fairly predictably; we fought and made up over trivial things, stole kisses whenever we could, swore we would get married, and figured out how to get as handsy as possible with the almost nonexistent privacy we had. We started out holding hands under the hymnal and ended up groping each other during the sermon. It's really no wonder his parents hated me.

Some people consider me a slut for the physical part of our relationship; others consider him practically a rapist. The truth is that we were young and neither of us had a clue. Sometimes I blame myself, sometimes him. Mostly I just shake my head at the memories and move on.

Gil and I lasted a year before I realized we weren't going to last and broke it off.

We tried to stay friends, and that might have worked if Roderich hadn't still been in love with me. Sweet as ever, he made it clear he wanted to try again, and silly as ever, I gave in. Gil and I proceeded to have a huge fight over my virtue, Roderich let me cry on his shoulder and cussed Gil out, and that was that.

Roderich and I lasted six months, give or take, before I couldn't lie to myself anymore. That breakup was…not pleasant.

Gil and I spent almost a year not speaking after he implied that I was easy, before we broke under how much we missed each other. A week after we made up, he left for college, and we rebuilt our friendship from afar. It worked better that way, though there were – are – times I desperately wished I could see his face again. His mother was predictably nasty about my reappearance, my friends and family predictably skeptical (that my father liked Gil about as much as Gil's mom liked me.) But we'd learned a few things, and our relationship was just stronger for all we'd been through.

We haven't fought since then. It's been years, and we talk almost every night, just like we used to.

Given my temper and his fondness for teasing I almost can't believe that, but it's true. We avoid the things that seriously caused problems for us – namely refusing to compromise on our still-differing versions of faith – and he stopped pushing so hard when he teased me. Meanwhile I feel as though I have a certain amount of anger I'm allowed to feel against each person I know over a lifetime and after six years I've exhausted Gil's supply. That's not, of course, to say that he doesn't antagonize me sometimes. We wouldn't be us if he didn't annoy me.

As I say, it's been years since we settled things. I haven't dated since (can't quite bring myself to believe boys are worth it, though I _hope_ this kind of drama won't be the norm), nor do I see his family. Even so, I have a reputation, and I've been judged quite recently based solely on that reputation.

That's what happens in a small town.

As far as I know, Gil hasn't been followed by what happened. My reputation is probably worse thanks to how soon I dated Roderich (four months after breaking up with Gil. That's she-was-probably-playing-them-both fast around here) and thanks, of course, to Gil's mom. But no one at his school knows who I am. None of them are from here. That's mostly why, while I imagine there's gossip about him there (it's a tiny Bible College), I don't feature in it.

Sometimes I want to leave here just so I can see what it's like to outrun my stupid mistakes.

So now here I am, still in this small town. I'm twenty-two. Gil still calls me "child," even though I'm older; he says he's earned the right, which is true, and it doesn't chafe the way it used to. I still call him "Gilbreath" when I want to annoy him. Roderich and I haven't spoken in years (thankfully he doesn't live here.) I haven't cut my hair in four years and I go to a church that's perfectly fine with the idea of a girl wearing blue jeans. I'm thinking of moving away from here.

And I am as much, as hopelessly, in love with Gilbert as I ever was. Only time will tell if that will ever change.


End file.
